Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

The Meat FIX for the week…

Discuss this article at the Diner Pantry

I have a confession to make.

I am a MEAT ADDICT.

This addiction may be even worse than my Beer Addiction, it's a tossup.

I can blame the Meat Addiction on my parents. Growing up in my youngest years in Brasil, they often took me to Churascarias where many delicious cuts of meat were served up directly off the spit. My Taste Buds became so entranced by the flavor of Meat cooked over an Open Flame that upon returning to the FSoA around age 10 or so, I immediately embarked on a career as a BBQ Chef, utilizing a small Cast Iron Hibachi that was the site of many Steaks, Burgers, Chicken Wings and Salmon Fillets being Grilled to PERFECTION!

I am of course aware these days of how poorly treated the cows, pigs and chickens are by our Industrial Ag system, but people aren't treated a whole lot better and it becomes a bit much to worry about the unfortunate life of […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Discuss this article at the Environment Table inside the Diner

Recently James Hansen, considered by many to be the #1 Climate Scientist in the world published an academic article of over 100 pages in length where he delineates scientifc evidence for ongoing and rapidly accelerating Climate Change. Said climat change seems likely to cause a hefty Sea Level Rise a good deal faster than the Century or more it was originally predicted to take. According to Jim, we could se Big Shities like Miami and New York going under inside 30 years if we don't "change our ways".

Now, it's pretty clear in low lying cities like Miami that this is already today's problem, not tomorrow's problem. With every High Tide and just a little extra push from a light breeze, the Miami streets start flooding and the sewage systems backup.

You would think with this occurring on virtually a monthly basis, people would get a clue and start moving out of Miami, but alas no. The Florida State Goobermint itself is in Denial […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Discuss this Interview at the Podcast Table inside the Diner

We talked with our most recent addition to the Diner Pantheon of cross posting Bloggers, Jeffrey Tucker this past Sunday. Jeff blogs on the Liberty.me website, presenting a Libertarian viewpoint on many topics we also cover on the Diner. He titles his own blog Beautiful Anarchy, in which he covers economics, art, popular culture, and politics from a pro-liberty, anti-state point of view.

I ran across Jeff's work when I read an article he wrote about a speech he went to, given by current Republican POTUS candidate and leader in the Polls, Donald Trump. Since The Donald also styles himself as a Libertarian, it was fascinating to read Jeff's take on Trump, and the audience reactions to his message.

Here on the Diner, we also have a POTUS Poll running, which you can take HERE. The Donald is currently ranked first as the WORST POTUS candidate by Kollapsniks.

Even more fascinating was talking to Jeff and getting his take on […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Discuss this article at the Economics Table inside the Diner

Fear Rises As Financial Markets All Over The Planet Start To Crash

Can you feel the panic in the air? CNN Money’s Fear & Greed Index measures the amount of fear in the financial world on a scale from 0 to 100. The closer it is to zero, the higher the level of fear. Last Monday, the index was sitting at a reading of 36. As I write this article, it has fallen to 7. The financial turmoil which began last week is threatening to turn into an avalanche. On Sunday night, we witnessed the second largest one day stock market collapse in China ever, and this pushed stocks all over the planet into the red. Meanwhile, the twin blades of an emerging market currency crisis and a commodity price crash are chewing up economies that are dependent on the export of natural resources all over the globe. For a long time, I have been warning about what would happen in the […] Continue Reading…

“The world’s most famous climate scientist just outlined an alarming scenario for our planet’s future” — The Washington Post

The bad news is that even now, the pundits cannot stop using the weasel words, false equivalencies and unsourced generalizations that give the politicians and other willfully ignorant people enough room to act as if nothing important is happening. That Florida property is not “at risk,” it’s doomed. It’s not that the flood risk “could be worse than we thought,” it’s going to be worse than we ever imagined. What James Hansen (and, by the way, 16 other world-renowned experts) outlined was not “an alarming scenario for our planet,” but a sentence of death and destruction for […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Discuss this article at the Collapse Narratives Table inside the Diner

As the girl in the café had warned, it was difficult finding anywhere to park when they drove the short distance up the coast to the old town of Penzance. Cars were pouring in from all directions and queuing up in long lines on the approach roads. “Jesus,” said Cat, wafting her face with a sheaf of papers she had brought from work, “it’s be quicker if we walked.” As they neared it became clear that it was not just the volume of traffic that was causing problems; traffic lights were out of action and drivers were having to take turns letting one another in, something they executed with remarkable good grace, Cat thought.

Eventually Jack managed to park the van down a side street and the two of them walked the remaining ten minutes into the town. Cat looked around her with interest. It didn’t look like any of the other places she had been to in this country. Walls […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of Pepe Escobar
Follow us on Twitter @doomstead666
Friend us on Facebook

Originally published in RT on July 30, 2015

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Even before the upcoming August recess on Capitol Hill, the dogs of war, unleashed by remote control from Tel Aviv, predictably are trying to tear the Iran-P5+1 nuclear deal to shreds from all sides.

It does not matter that the National Iranian American Council – which happens to be widely respected in Washington itself – has forcefully come out in defense of the deal.

It does not matter that the Obama administration can count on the combined efforts of the so-called E3 ambassadors (Britain, France and Germany) in Washington, who are exhausting themselves to explain the obvious: This is an international treaty, already approved by the United Nations, and not a parochial squabble decided in Idaho.

On the other hand, it does matter that the Obama administration has not been forceful enough to defend its strategy as well as the result of such a long and treacherous negotiation.

So there are now two narratives shaping the battle ahead in Washington.

1) Iran is a rogue nation, an existential threat to Israel, and it cannot be trusted. It will breach the deal, […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Image by James Good

Discuss this article at the Kitchen Sink inside the Diner

Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" explained with a practical example: a tourist trap in Florence

Garrett Hardin's idea of "The Tragedy of the Commons" has become well known, but not always really understood. In my case, I can say that I have big troubles in having my students grasping its mechanism; that is the interplay of individual advantage versus public goods; the basic factor that leads to what we call "overexploitation."

Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that Hardin used the example of sheep and pastures to explain the reasons of the tragedy, but that's rather unfamiliar to my students (as well as to most of us). For instance, many of my students don't seem to be able to grasp the concept of "overgrazing", that is the fact that grass doesn't regrow if it is grazed too much. Besides, the pastures that Hardin was considering never experienced the "tragedy"; they were well managed and well regulated, specifically in order to […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Discuss this areticle at the Energy Table inside the Diner

While we might think of money as supporting our economy, only energy can support the solvency of a nation, and only surplus energy can fulfill the aspirations of its rulers and the desires of its citizens. Until the advent of the industrial revolution, and in particular the universal availability of cheap oil, that energy could only come from territory that could produce sufficient food and other essentials for any level of civilized living. We might ‘demand’ that our leaders provide new hospitals, schools, roads and all the other things that make life comfortable, but without the necessary surplus energy to do it, it is impossible. No political posturing or promises or taxation can change that.

Most deny it, but we live in an energy economy, not a money economy. Without the continually increasing forward thrust of energy input, no economy can exist in the context that we have become used to.

Not just the Greeks, but those charged with governing every nation […] Continue Reading…

America-Firsters hated it when Will McAvoy deflated the country’s standing in the world on HBO’s The Newsroom. They hate it even more when academic studies show everything he said was true. (HBO Photo)

Published on the Daily Impact on July 27, 2015

In the first episode of HBO’s The Newsroom, anchorman Will McAvoy (played by Jeff Daniels) delivers a rant that begins: “There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, No. 4 in labor force and No. 4 in exports.” Writer Aaron Sorkin was accused of everything but jihad for having his character express such negative thoughts about America, and the program was heartily loathed during its run by real Americans. Now, three years later, a new academic study confirms what Will had to say. And more.

Now, Will’s rant was presented as an ad-libbed monologue by a pissed-off anchorman. It was not sourced, nor was it precise in its definitions. “Literacy” by what definition, for example, as tested by whom, how? These […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Discuss this article at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner

It’s not too interesting to say that Donald Trump is a nationalist and aspiring despot who is manipulating bourgeois resentment, nativism, and ignorance to feed his power lust. It’s uninteresting because it is obviously true. It’s so true that stating it sounds more like an observation than a criticism.

I just heard Trump speak live. It was an awesome experience, like an interwar séance of once-powerful dictators who inspired multitudes, drove countries into the ground, and died grim deaths.

His speech at FreedomFest lasted a full hour, and I consider myself fortunate for having heard it. It was a magnificent exposure to an ideology that is very much present in American life, though hardly acknowledged. It lives mostly hidden in dark corners, and we don’t even have a name for it. You bump into it at neighborhood barbecues, at Thanksgiving dinner when Uncle Harry has the floor, at the hardware store when two old friends in line to checkout mutter about the state of […] Continue Reading…

From the keyboard of James Howard Kunstler
Follow us on Twitter @doomstead666
Like us on Facebook

Originally Published on Clusterfuck Nation July 27, 2015

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

How many of you brooding on the dreadful prospect of Hillary have chanced to survey what remains of Democratic Party (cough cough) leadership in the background of Her Royal Inevitableness? Nothing is the answer. Zip. Nobody. A vacuum. There is no Democratic Party anymore. There are no figures of gravitas anywhere to be found, no ideas really suited to the American prospect, nothing with the will to oppose the lumbering parasitic corporatocracy that is doing little more than cluttering up this moment in history while it sucks the last dregs of value from our society.

I say this as a lifelong registered Democrat but a completely disaffected one — who regards the Republican opposition as the mere errand boy of the above-named lumbering parasitic corporatocracy. Readers are surely chafing to insert that the Democrats have been no less errand boys (and girls) for the same disgusting zeitgeist, and they are surely correct in the case of Hillary, and indeed of the current President.

Readers are surely also chafing to insert that there is Bernie Sanders, […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Discuss this article at the Environment Table inside the Diner

"The Maya forest garden holds, in its ramblings and roots, a hidden-in-plain-sight way through our present crises."

It takes a bit of time for the elegance of a food forest to emerge, something on the order of decades. Strolling the garden through the morning mist in a hot Tennessee summer, we tried to remember what this landscape looked like 21 years ago, when we moved to this site, set up our yurt and started in on our little corner of paradise.

What we see today does not remotely resemble what was here then. Then there was a wire-fenced, stony horse paddock in a re-emerging poplar forest. The deep soil tilth now is blanketed in thick vines, their giant leaves hiding pumpkins, squashes and melons. Bamboo cathedrals twined with akebia and passionfruit arch 70 feet (20 meters) over a duck pond next to our cob henhouse. As we let out our poultry for their daily bug chase, bullfrogs croak and leap away. A snapping turtle submerges beneath […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Why should we favor human liberty over a social order ruled by power? In providing the answer, I would suggest that libertarians can generally be divided into two camps: humanitarians and brutalists.

The humanitarians are drawn to reasons such as the following. Liberty allows peaceful human cooperation. It inspires the creative service of others. It keeps violence at bay. It allows for capital formation and prosperity. It protects human rights of all against invasion. It allows human associations of all sorts to flourish on their own terms. It socializes people with rewards toward getting along rather than tearing each other apart, and leads to a world in which people are valued as ends in themselves rather than fodder in the central plan.

We know all of this from history and experience. These are all great reasons to love liberty.

But they are not the only reasons that people support liberty. There is a segment of the population of self-described libertarians—described here as brutalists—who find all the above rather boring, broad, and excessively humanitarian. To […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

An appalling amount of the Northern Hemisphere is on fire. At the beginning of this month, 314 wildfires were raging in Alaska alone. They have seared 5 million acres so far this year and have torched up to half a million acres in a single day. Meanwhile, to the east in Canada’s Northwest Territory, hundreds of fires were raging in the permafrost zone, having covered over two million acres by the end of June. The forested northern provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan were similarly afflicted — 522 fires in northern Saskatchewan alone by June 30, nearly four times as many as last year in the same period.

Southward from Alaska, at the beginning of this month, wildfires dotted the landscapes of all the western states as far south as southern California and as far east as Colorado. One California fire overran a traffic jam on a freeway, leaving behind a dystopian landscape of burned-out cars (but, remarkably, no serious casualties).

Wildfires were raging across southern Siberia and Inner Mongolia by mid-April. At the moment, more than 50 wildfires are burning in […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Discuss this article at the Environment Table inside the Diner

TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

Order the problems we face in Collapse from the most pressing ones to the least pressing ones in need of addressing First

Sea Level Rise

Atmospheric Carbon Content

Monetary System Collapse

Geopolitical Conflict/War

Fossil Fuel Energy Depletion

Human Population Overshoot

Loss of Liberty/Police State

Terrorism

Nuclear Power Plants/Spent Fuel

Food Production

Drought

Population Migrations/Refugees

The Big Climate Newz of the week was that James Hansen, considered by many to be the #1 Climate Scientist in the world released his latest report on the crappy state of the earth. Now, the report is up online and downloadable for Free in .pdf form, all 121 pages of it. You can peruse it at your leisure, but if you have been following the “climate debate” for any period of time and are not in a state of complete denial, it's not going to tell you anything real new that you don't intuitively know already, that the climate is changing and that change appears to be accelerating. In nice scientific fashion, Jim documents this, and […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Discuss this Survey at the Geopolitics Table inside the Diner

TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

I haven't dropped any new surveys onto the Diner since we had all the problems in June, which probably were not related to The Human Extinction Survey, but nonetheless it has made me skittish about using that plugin.

Besides that though, it doesn't have a means for doing a Ranking Answer, which is something I have been looking for in a Polling system. I believe I finally found one! It's off-site, so it poses no threat to the Diner server. It's also FREE up to 50 responses anyhow.

After you go to the page, you just slide the worst choice to the top of the list, the least worst to the bottom. It's not a complete list of all possibilities, but I think I got most of the main contenders in the horse race to be the Leader of an Empire in Collapse for the next 4 years.

Once you are done with your sort, you hit the Finished Sorting radio […] Continue Reading…

Off the keyboard of Pepe Escobar
Follow us on Twitter @doomstead666
Friend us on Facebook

Published in Russia Insider on July 24, 2015

A massive overview of all the recent exciting developments on the Eurasian landmass
An alternative to the US-led world order is definitely taking shape and at a lighting pace – giving Washington the creeps

Let’s start with the geopolitical Big Bang you know nothing about, the one that occurred just two weeks ago. Here are its results: from now on, any possible future attack on Iran threatened by the Pentagon (in conjunction with NATO) would essentially be an assault on the planning of an interlocking set of organizations – the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), the EEU (Eurasian Economic Union), the AIIB (the new Chinese-founded Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank), and the NDB (the BRICS’ New Development Bank) – whose acronyms you’re unlikely to recognize either. Still, they represent an emerging new order in Eurasia.

Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Islamabad, and New Delhi have been actively establishing interlocking security guarantees.They have been simultaneously calling the Atlanticist bluff when it comes to the endless drumbeat of attention given to the flimsy meme of Iran’s “nuclear weapons program.” And a few days before the […] Continue Reading…

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Discuss this article at the Science & Technology Table inside the Diner

My friend and I joke about techno-optimists. Both of us have wasted enough time on the internet reading the prognostications of self described technocrats, transhumanists, and even optimistic liberals who carry with them and promote a picture of the future that is near utopian in it’s advancements and its cleanliness. This optimism is shared widely by younger generations who cannot be bothered to understand the totality of the destruction wrought on the planet and its ecosystems over the last few hundred years. Advances in communications technology have people believing that anything is possible, and depending on their politics, their reasoning is essentially that either government, corporations, capitalists, or some combination of them is all that stands between us and a near workless future of global equality and abundance. A trip to the Apple Store and a copy of Popular Mechanics seemingly forms their understanding of not only what humans can do, but what they should do.

Visit the New Diner News Page for Daily Updates from around the Collapse Blogosphere

Discuss this article at the Economics Table inside the Diner

Europe’s Vindictive Privatization Plan for Greece – Project Syndicate

For the Project Syndicate site click here. Or…

ATHENS – On July 12, the summit of eurozone leaders dictated its terms of surrender to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who, terrified by the alternatives, accepted all of them. One of those terms concerned the disposition of Greece’s remaining public assets.

Eurozone leaders demanded that Greek public assets be transferred to a Treuhand-like fund – a fire-sale vehicle similar to the one used after the fall of the Berlin Wall to privatize quickly, at great financial loss, and with devastating effects on employment all of the vanishing East German state’s public property.

This Greek Treuhand would be based in – wait for it – Luxembourg, and would be run by an outfit overseen by Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, the author of the scheme. It would complete the fire sales within three years. But, whereas the work of the original Treuhand was accompanied by massive West German investment […] Continue Reading…

Support the Diner

Search the Diner

Polls & Podcasts

" As a daily reader of all of the doomsday blogs, e.g. the Diner, Nature Bats Last, Zerohedge, Scribbler, etc… I must say that I most look forward to your “off the microphone” rants. Your analysis, insights, and conclusions are always logical, well supported, and clearly articulated – a trifecta not frequently achieved."- Joe D

Log In

Inside the Diner

Donald Trump climbing the polls, and maybe even beginning to believe his own claptrap is weirdYears ago I wrote a forecast, (can't find it--you'll have to take my word on it) that by 2016 or at the latest 2020, a (serious) POTUS candidate would come ...

QuoteI have a confession to make.I am a MEAT ADDICT.This addiction may be even worse than my Beer Addiction, it's a tossup.Now I know why I have always considered you a Meat Head. Should have known it had something to do with a lack of pro...